Executive Pay: What's Right, What's Wrong, and What Could Be Fixed?

Executive pay is a controversial topic that is arguably the primary cause behind mistrust in business. Various remedies have been proposed but, just like in medicine, diagnosis precedes treatment. Many of the concerns are based on hand-picked examples and myths rather than rigorous data.

Evidence will be presented on which aspects of pay are working well and which are indeed dysfunctional, and on how pay should be reformed.

Alex Edmans is the Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, Professor of Finance at London Business School, and a TED Speaker.

He completed his BA in Economics and Management at Merton College, University of Oxford, and did his PhD in Finance as a Fulbright Scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2007, Professor Edmans joined The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, as an Assistant Professor of Finance and then was promoted to a tenured Associate Professor.

Working at the intersection of academia and practice, Professor Edmans is an expert on corporate finance (including executive compensation, corporate governance, investment, growth and innovation), behavioural finance and investing, and corporate social responsibility.

Professor Edmans is the current Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe. He has published his research in leading academic journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and Huffington Post.

Professor Edmans serves as the Academic Director of LBS Centre for Corporate Governance, and more generally is a pioneer in corporate governance reform – in particular, embedding purpose into the heart of business and encouraging companies to think long-term. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum at Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and presented to the World Bank Board of Directors under their Distinguished Speaker Series. He gave the TED talk “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World” and the TEDx talk “The Social Responsibility of Business.”

Professor Edmans is a winner of the Rising Star of Corporate Governance Award, Rising Star of Finance Award, and appeared on the 2017 Poets and Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors list. He has also collected a raft of teaching and innovation awards from London Business School, including the LBS Best Teacher Award from the MBA 2016 graduating class, as well as 14 teaching awards in his 6 years at Wharton.

He is passionate about making finance research available and understandable for a non-academic audience so that it influences the way people think and act. He was appointed the Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business in 2018.